Watch 8:24
The stark, chaotic power of Donald Glover’s ‘This Is America’
Infectious in beat, jarring in violence and imagery, Donald Glover's new music video "This Is America" touches on painful racial history and our contemporary culture of mass entertainment and murder. Jeffrey Brown talks with Rolling Stone contributor Tre Johnson about…
Twitter Chat: Grammy Awards embrace diversity, but is there still work to be done?
This year, is it enough for hip hop artists to simply have been nominated at the Grammy awards? Have the ideas they’ve raised in their music about equality, politics and oppression made an impact without an artist taking home a…
Watch 8:26
How the U.S. became the hip-hop nation
The Grammys are catching up with public opinion by recognizing hip-hop artists in its top categories this year. At Harvard University's Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, the genre and its history is the subject of academic study as a brilliant…
Watch 3:33
Turning silence on police shootings into poetry
Hip-hop is the soundtrack to poet Marcus Wicker's daily life, and his love for the music comes out naturally in his writing, which addresses topics like the violence perpetrated against black bodies. Wicker offers his Brief but Spectacular take on…
The 60th annual Grammy Award nominations offered some surprise snubs, a lack of traditional pop nominees and a strong showing by today’s leading hip-hop artists.
America's song of the summer was the reggaeton hit "Despacito." But it wasn't the top song everywhere.
Two groundbreaking artists died this week. Comedian Garry Shandling, star of the Emmy-winning “The Larry Sanders Show,” and rapper Malik Taylor, who co-founded the Grammy-nominated group A Tribe Called Quest under the stage name Phife Dawg, died within two days…
The members of Black Violin want to change perceptions about who can play what kind of music. Wil Baptiste on viola and Kev Marcus on violin met as high school orchestra nerds. Today they play genre-bending music, blending classical music…
He’s on the $10 bill and he died in a duel, but what else do you know about Alexander Hamilton? Now his life is the subject of a cutting-edge hip-hop Broadway musical, created by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Jeffrey Brown talks to…
